Kaeya Majmundar delivers her business pitch of BZBox to multi-millionaire Robert Herjavec and a table of investors on the ABC TV show, Shark Tank. Photo courtesy of ABC Network
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Fresh out of high school, Tu hopes teachers and schools can promote this sense of entrepreneurship even before college. “Schools need to do better job of encouraging that,” Tu said. “We have our core curriculum with math and science, but there’s really nothing right now that pushes kids to go out there and build something.” Joining the “green” movement early on, Cai and Bernardi firmly believe that engaging with any entrepreneurial endeavor not only helped them find their own start-up, but will help them grow into driven individuals. “The most employable person is a highly-motivated 20-something-year-old who has demonstrated commitment to building something, rather than someone who is trained by the books,” Cai said. “It’s in the actual process of building something awesome, and seeing it fail or succeed and learning from it, is where I think the future of education is.” Bernardi agrees, believing entrepreneurship can train an individual 22 Hinsdale Magazine | www.hinsdale60521.com
to translate passion into work. With help from his mentors, Bernardi said he decided to take a year off to put everything towards Sprout, and advises others to try it as well. “Just do it; give yourself one year,” he said. “A year can be easily made up. When you’re 21, it doesn’t matter. You would be really surprised what you can do with that one year when you dedicate all the time you want to build your own dream, rather than someone else’s.”
Lori Greiner of QVC. Receiving a 40 percent stake in her company, she is now working on retail for her product.
“I was really, really nervous, but I was also very prepared. I had that pitch down cold.”
Shark, paper, scissors Growing up, Kaeya Majmundar was surrounded by the field of medicine. With parents as doctors and on the premed track herself, the thought of running her own business never occurred to her, until she combined cardboard boxes and origami to create her very own invention: the “BZbox.” Recently featured on ABC’s reality television show Shark Tank, Majumundar’s BZbox landed her a $50,000 investment from shark investor
Majmundar conceptualized BZbox after her freshman year of college. While assisting her friend move out of their dorm, she noticed the difficulty in assembling a typical cardboard box. After going home for the summer, Majmundar found the solution as a collapsible storage box. In November 2012, she applied to Shark Tank with BZbox as her product, but didn’t get to pitch her idea until June 2013. “They flew me out in June, prepped me a little bit and helped me with my